Yesterday, I mentioned how I was considering moving off my iPhone 15 Pro earlier than originally planned. I bought my iPhone through AT&T and will not fully pay it off until October. My plan was to replace my iPhone then with a Google Pixel phone and install GrapheneOS on it, both continuing my move off of Apple while increasing my personal security, not to mention supporting a great open source project. Last year, however, I had purchased a cheap Android phone, the Doogee Blade10 Pro, and, while it does not support loading a different OS such as Graphene, Lineage, or e/OS, I have plenty of options to use this phone without connecting to my Google account.

Doogee specializes in rugged Android phones and tablets, with angular and rubberized frames which include waterproof seals for ports such as the USB-C charging/data port at the bottom. The Blade10 Pro also features 16GB of memory and 256GB of internal storage, a 5150mAh battery, dual nano-SIMs for multiple phone numbers, and a microSD card slot for up to 2TB of additional storage. The phone normally costs $229.99, but I was able to snag it on sale back in October of last year for $169.99. Personally, I think this is a steal of a phone for the price, but how will it hold up compared to my iPhone?

Obviously, I’m not expecting the Blade10 Pro to do better than the iPhone 15 Pro, but, honestly, the iPhone is waaaay overpowered for what I want and need from a smartphone, especially as I work to depend on it less and less. I’m betting that this cheap Android phone will be good enough for government work until I can get the Pixel and move to GrapheneOS.

How do I use this phone without Google, though, even if I can’t flash the OS? First, unlike Apple, I don’t need to sign into a Google account when I set up the phone. I can just skip that step and get into Android. Second, also unlike Apple (though for how much longer?), I can download alternative app stores and repositories. The main one I will use is called F-Droid, which features a ton of open source apps and alternatives to apps and services provided by the big tech companies like Google. The second, which I will get from F-Droid, is Aurora Store, which gives me anonymous access to the Google Play Store so I can download any apps which aren’t available via F-Droid without logging into Google. Between these two app sources, I can get any app I need.

Of course, let’s not forget the PHONE part of a smartphone, as I still do make and receive phone calls. Fortunately, I checked and confirmed that the Blade10 Pro can connect to the AT&T network, though I will need to swing by the AT&T store and have them program a nano-SIM card as the iPhone has an eSim, meaning no physical card to move from one device to the other. This is a minor inconvenience, however, and one I hope to handle over this weekend.

I’m apparently not the only person who’s looked at using Android without a Google account, as The Privacy Dad’s Blog features an article on just this situation, including a link to a list of apps which they found via F-Droid and Aurora Store. Many of them I already use on the iPhone, so this transition is much easier as a result.